Google's John Mueller has confirmed a hyphen in your domain name carries no SEO penalty, ending a long-running myth. The real advice is to pick a name people will ask for by name, hyphen or not.
Make something truly awesome that people will ask for by name. If that takes a hyphen, go for it.
One of the SEO industry's oldest superstitions just got put down. Google's John Mueller has confirmed that a hyphen in your domain name carries no negative ranking signal. Hyphenated domains have been treated as spammy for years. Google says that assumption was wrong.
Mueller went further. He advised picking a trusted extension like .com even if it means adding a hyphen, rather than reaching for a cheap or spam-prone alternative to get a shorter name. His actual recommendation cut through the keyword obsession entirely.
The SEO penalty for a hyphen in your domain name, according to Google. Source: Search Engine Journal, June 2026.
Why it matters
This is a small technical point with a bigger lesson buried in it. A generation of marketers made decisions based on SEO folklore that was never tested against what Google actually does. The hyphen myth is one of dozens. Acting on superstition is not a strategy, it is a hope.
The deeper signal in Mueller's advice is the one worth keeping. He is steering people away from keyword-stuffed, short-lived domains and toward brand names people remember. In a world where search increasingly answers questions without a click, being the name someone types in is worth more than ranking for a phrase nobody clicks.
What to do about it
The myths are cheap to believe and expensive to act on. Trade the superstition for a name people remember.